Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A flywheel can be used to store energy by converting the energy to be stored into kinetic energy associated with a rotating flywheel. Energy may subsequently be extracted from the storage system by converting the kinetic energy in the flywheel to electrical energy using a generator.
The amount of energy stored in a flywheel is dependent, among other things, on the speed of rotation of the flywheel. The present disclosure appreciates that at very high speeds the force required to hold the flywheel together may become prohibitively high.